The coming Cloud wars: Google+ vs Microsoft (plus Facebook)

The next year in tech will be all about building connections
between PC and post-PC devices, whether phones, tablets, game
consoles, e-readers or next-gen SmartRoombas. They'll
be connections without cords, built on shared interfaces,
proximity-based communication, and storage, syncing and computing
infrastructure increasingly shifted to the cloud.

That's what Tuesday's release of OS X
Lion is all about: building on the App Store and iCloud. That's what
Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 8 is all
about: building on unified IDs on everything from Windows Phone 7
to Office to Xbox and Skype.

And I'm going to convince you that this is even what Google+ is
really all about. You can see this already in Google+'s mobile apps
for Android and
iOS; we'll see it more as Google continues to integrate more of its
web properties into the social network.

The company-wide rollout of "+" is Google's play for the whole
stack -- half Trojan horse and half battering ram.

We've long passed the Friendster moment of making and browsing
stand-alone databases of profile pages. Social networks don't work
that way any more, just as PCs aren't stuck with sorting and saving
local files in folders.

Dumbill calls this "the social backbone of the web." It's
already a much bigger part of the tech ecosystem than any
particular portal you may log into and stare at for part of the day
reading status updates.

Fundamentally, what Facebook has done is built a way for you to
figure out who people are. That system is missing in the internet
as a whole. Google should have
worked on this earlier. We now have a product called Google+, which
has been in development for more than a year and a half, which is
a partial answer to that…

I think that's the area where I would have put more resources,
developing these identity services and ranking systems that go
along with that. That would have made a big difference for the
internet as a whole.

Facebook, the biggest social network, is already using its
identity machine to power login credentials for cloud-backed
client apps like Spotify, comment threads for web sites like
Gawker Media, personalised search for
Bing and integrated contact management for Windows Phone
7. Twitter plays a similar role with a huge ecosystem of sites and
applications, and increasingly inside Apple's iOS.

At a minimum, Google+ will do the same for Google's webapps,
browsers and operating systems -- and potentially many more
third-party partners who want to take advantage of that sheer
number of accounts. Google's chief advantage is that unlike
Facebook, it has direct access to its own giant mobile computing
platform: Android.

For Schmidt, mobile computing, too, is about identity and
personalisation, not just communication:

Mobile devices...are inherently better [than PCs]. They're more
personal; with your permission, they know who you are [and] they
can make suggestions for you.

Facebook may know who you are, but it doesn't have Google's or
Apple's vertical control of the computing platform on desktop or
mobile. Instead, it has a trusted, longtime partner and investor
who does: Microsoft.

Flickr.com / Sonia Luna

Google's Strategy: the best defence is a good
offence

This is why we can't just look at these social networks
head-to-head to understand what they are or what's going to happen
next. To borrow Google+'s guiding metaphor, we have to look at
their extended circles. And the most important intersection of
Google's and Facebook's extended circles is Microsoft.

Microsoft gives Facebook a foothold in voice and video chat
(with Skype), search (with Bing), mobile (with WinPhone7) and
potentially the desktop and living room (with Windows 8 and Xbox).
In exchange, Facebook gives Microsoft an additional boost to its
already powerful identity and sharing tools, which it can build
into gaming, document creation and management, and other media
properties.

Google didn't need to launch a social network to win skirmishes
with Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Quora or the rest; it needed a
social platform to defend itself against a unified Microsoft and
Facebook. Luckily, the company's been able to defend itself in a
way that also puts pressure on all of Microsoft and Facebook's
properties, from Office on down.

That's what Vincent Wong focuses on in a clever slideshow
(posted at G+, naturally), "What G+ is all about (pst!!! it's not social)." Google, Wong
argues, is pursuing a "blue ocean" strategy. Instead of fighting
for market share in the highly-competitive "red ocean" of social
networking at status updates, Google+ lets Google move into the
still-largely-unclaimed "blue ocean" of "fixing collaboration and
sharing across apps and across platforms."

Instead of focusing on the tiny update bar on the far right of
Google's new Plus-enhanced toolbar, Wong says, we should look again
at everything to the left: Gmail, Calendar, Documents, Photos,
Reader, and Web. "That's almost everything you use on your
computer!" shouts the caption to one of Wong's slides, pairing
Google's toolbar with the primary corresponding apps on both
Windows and Mac OS X.

I think you can see this already in Google+'s
just-released iOS app. If Google+ were seriously targeting
Twitter or Tumblr, it would make it easy (rather than impossible)
to reshare your friends' content on the go like those two platforms
do. Instead, Google+ for iPhone becomes a notification machine,
pulling you again and again to your circles, their updates, and the
media they repackage.

Like YouTube and Maps, Google+ becomes a slickly packaged trojan
horse (in the original sense of the metaphor) inside Apple's own
phones. And Windows Phone? Early on, Mobile Internet Explorer
wouldn't even support G+ -- and despite rumors, Google doesn't even offer a
"coming soon" for a native app.

That's where things really get interesting -- particularly if
Google can turn its identity system into the kind of purchasing
system that Apple and Amazon have, pairing it with its advertising
power and ever-present mobile phones to create a virtual mobile wallet.

If Silicon Valley were hosting a basketball tournament for
consumer money and mindshare in the cloud, right now we'd be
looking at a Final Four of Google, Apple (plus Twitter), Microsoft
(plus Facebook) and Amazon (especially if they can make a
compelling tablet). Apple just had its earnings call;
Microsoft's is tomorrow.

The stakes are high, the players are ready. It's a fun time to
be a fan.